There have been a number of comments here about the "secret" secure room in San Francisco where Internet traffic is snooped. When General Alexander was head of the NSA (where he built a replica of the Star Trek bridge with taxpayer money for his commmand) he issued the directive to "Collect it all!"

The "room" was in AT&T's facility, not Google's, and tapped a major Internet backbone link. It's been known and documented for years. See the deposition of Mark Klein dated June 8, 2006, formerly of AT&T (class action suit led by EFF vs AT&T: C-06-0672-VRW in US District Court, Northern District of California). He describes the sequence of events, persons, locations, equipment, and details involved in installing the tap of all Internet traffic passing through the fiber lines at the AT&T location at 611 Folsom St., San Francisco, and sending them to room 641A, designated a secret locked "secure room." More technical details, diagrams, and photos here but note that all this info is VERY OLD - 13 years old!

All the major telcos participated in the program back then except Qwest which (as noted by drinkypoo above directly resulted in the destruction of that company (they lost major government contracts) and 6 years in prison for its CEO Joseph Nacchio (for relying on those contracts). Nacchio was finally released from prison in 2013 after serving the full 6 years. The telcos were later granted immunity by congress and other cases have been quashed on grounds of lack of standing because evidence would impinge on national security. Perhaps it seemed all too technical and abstract at the time for people to pay attention but the news has been out there for a long time. We can only imagine where things stand today.

I noticed Google down just as it started and when I checked I found that Spectrum (which still uses rr.com for naming) was sending all Google bound traffic to Tata communications (an Indian Company) which sent it over to Europe on its circuits then Transtelecom in South Africa,which moved it to Chinanet. Traceroute excerpt: 10 0.ae2.pr1.dfw10.tbone.rr.com (107.14.17.236) 66.274 ms 0.ae0.pr1.dfw10.tbone.rr.com (107.14.17.232) 68.537 ms 0.ae4.pr1.dfw10.tbone.rr.com (107.14.19.97) 69.705 ms 11 ix-ae-23-0.tcore2.dt8-dallas.as6453.net (66.110.57.97) 70.130 ms 71.137 ms 70.498 ms 12 if-ae-2-2.tcore1.dt8-dallas.as6453.net (66.110.56.5) 205.871 ms 205.041 ms 207.009 ms 13 if-ae-37-3.tcore1.aeq-ashburn.as6453.net (66.198.154.68) 208.978 ms 207.757 ms 212.871 ms 14 if-ae-2-2.tcore2.aeq-ashburn.as6453.net (216.6.87.1) 211.628 ms 212.403 ms 241.799 ms 15 if-ae-12-2.tcore4.njy-newark.as6453.net (216.6.87.43) 203.197 ms 204.385 ms if-ae-12-2.tcore4.njy-newark.as6453.net (216.6.87.223) 238.450 ms 16 if-ae-1-3.tcore3.njy-newark.as6453.net (216.6.57.5) 234.408 ms 235.627 ms 235.190 ms 17 if-ae-15-2.tcore1.l78-london.as6453.net (80.231.130.25) 239.527 ms 239.084 ms 240.261 ms 18 if-ae-2-2.tcore2.l78-london.as6453.net (80.231.131.1) 240.647 ms 241.425 ms 241.816 ms 19 if-ae-14-2.tcore2.av2-amsterdam.as6453.net (80.231.131.161) 246.783 ms 247.567 ms 246.319 ms 20 if-ae-2-2.tcore1.av2-amsterdam.as6453.net (195.219.194.5) 248.282 ms 167.135 ms 192.261 ms 21 if-ae-6-2.tcore1.fnm-frankfurt.as6453.net (195.219.194.150) 193.772 ms 197.050 ms 200.104 ms 22 195.219.156.146 (195.219.156.146) 213.840 ms 213.268 ms 219.112 ms 23 mskn17ra-lo1.transtelecom.net (217.150.55.21) 271.186 ms 266.862 ms 267.265 ms 24 * * ChinaTelecom-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.59.249) 280.990 ms 25 * * * 26 * * * 27 * * * 28 * * 154.72.45.166 (154.72.45.166) 466.625 ms There was a period in the middle of that time that Google appeared to be working but traceroute showed everything passing through chinanet and then on to Google, just long latency, but they couldn't keep it up and Google kept going down. There is another article about it at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... Sorry about the formatting but the /. editor is not accepting my line breaks. Figured the traceroute might be interesting to some even if it looks ugly.

When you entrust your business to an outside cloud service you are entrusting people, organizations, policies, and procedures that you don't and usually can't know with the keys to the success of your business. They can be very useful and cost effective in situations but I would never trust an outside organization for mission critical services.

Stuxnet was (is?) sophisticated but the article made me remember something I wrote back around 1981 or 1982 that, although not very sophisticated, was tiny, fast, and very destructive. I was in charge of a project that needed to make direct use of aspects of the IBM PC hardware that were not documented and we did a lot of experimentation and found a few fatal flaws that cost the company in ways that were unanticipated. It turns out that the original green monochrome graphics card, as easy on the eyes that it was and ubiquitous at the time, had to have a bit written out on an I/O port immediately on power up or the horizontal sync would lock causing the big horizontal output transistor in the monitor to saturate and become a dead short to ground from the power bus. The BIOS took care of that on power-up but it was possible to flip it off later. The monitor would screech for a few seconds and then die and smoke would come out of the case and sometimes catch fire if you didn't turn off the power in time. (That monitor did not have a power switch, it relied on the power switch on the PC.) Also, it turns out that the original floppy drives did not have stops at the end of the head moving screws and you could step the heads until they literally fell off with a loud "clunk" sound as the heads fell out of the drives. Just for fun, I wrote a short bootloader in assembly code that fit in the boot sector on a floppy that, in a couple of seconds after turning on the PC, would smoke your monitor, destroy all of your floppy drives, load a horrible noise into the shift register going to the speaker and set it free-running, turn off all interrupts and halt the CPU. There was nothing else on the floppy except for that one boot sector. An expensive and time consuming repair needed in less than 3 seconds after you turned on your computer and if you didn't get to the big red power switch quickly flames might start coming out of the monitor and the case start to melt! Although we documented the code and used it in house as something to watch out for, only one deadly floppy was made and we kept it under glass on the wall. I'll have to look and see if I still have a printout of the code stored away in a box somewhere.

I remember going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey days after it opened in the Cinerama theatre in my city. I was in high school and a couple of friends and I went to see it in the afternoon. Cinerama was incredible! I loved it and still consider it one of the best films ever made and it had a big impact on the rest of my life. At the time I was a musician and photographer and taking classes in space science outside of school while dabbling in electronics. Later I moved to northern California and was present to much of the early days of silicon valley. After spending a couple of decades mostly designing circuits and writing code for micros (lots of assembly language stuff) and later system architect for some larger projects I went on to invent and start companies based on novel 3D imaging methods and was the founder of the first wireless broadband Internet service in Austin, Texas in the 1990's. I'm retired now and spend much of my time making films again. I don't remember having any problem understanding 2001 the first time I saw it and have to give it credit for being the germ for much of the inspiration for my later accomplishments. I was an avid science fiction reader at the time and particularly loved Arthur Clarke's work. Unlike so much of the later scifi films and novels which were visually exciting but whose stories all seem to be thin remakes of shoot-em-up westerns or cop shows with aliens and blasters, 2001 was profoundly inspirational and evoked an almost religious meditation on who we are and our place in the universe. Interestingly, I just watched it again a couple of months ago and, even on a 55 inch display, I thought it was as powerful as the first time I saw it.

A little judicious shielding might easily fix the problem, but then there is the heat... I had a friend up north who heated his house with his Bitcoin miner system until his electric bill made it not worth the trouble anymore. Maybe the FCC is doing him a favor.

I remember getting a Geniac "computer" for my birthday back around 1960 and figuring out the logic for different ideas and implementing them by putting these little brass contacts into the 3 pegboard wheels which you could turn by hand to set the states and make little light bulbs light up for output. I would have been around 8 years old then and it was just for fun and learning. At that time programming often consisted of jumpers on patch boards - around 1980 I was surprised when a medical equipment company I worked for doing R&D tossed out boxes of those patchboards with their programming jumpers still in place; when I asked they said that they were finally updating their computer and the new computer couldn't read the old patchboards! My dad worked at Western Electric and took me down a couple of times around 1960 and I remember playing tac-tac-toe on a computer they had there. Later, around 1968, a friend of mine had graduated from high school and went to college and we both spent time writing and punching decks of cards for Fortran programs which ran on the schools IBM 1130. I remember having to pre-process the decks because the machine only had something like 4K of memory and everything had to stripped and compressed to run. In college, around 1970, I remember submitting card decks with programs I had written at a window and coming back the next day to pick up a printout of my syntax errors. I didn't write anything professionally until later in the 1970 when the 8008 came out and I started doing assembly language work (actually doing the assembly work by hand and writing out and entering the hex opcodes, sometimes in binary on switches, usually for hardware drivers). I get some nostalgic feelings for those times but I wouldn't want to do it again!

You bring up an interesting point, one that goes at the heart of the breakdown of the whole concept of copyright, ownership, and control of intellectual property. How much added "noise" does it take before an image (or audio, video, or even text) file is no longer considered the protected property?

Linking is the primary reason the web exists. That was the point when Tim Berners-Lee invented the web. If you don't want someone to link to your material you should restrict yourself to printing on your own paper.

I have a number of videos on YouTube going back years. My monetized videos get views regularly and their analytics shows that they are the result of searches and/or recommendations by YouTube. My non-monetized videos, just as old, have not had a view in years from YouTube's promotion or searches. If I search for them they are many pages deep whereas the monetized ones rank near the top when I look for them. I may as well put them on my web sites directly using html5 tags, it's easier.

After becoming successful and killing the cable companies using the sweat and labor of thousands of small video creators, Susan and her cohorts have decided to slap those same loyal and hardworking creators in the face and shut them out of what they created over many years and BECOME a cable company (the most hated businesses in the country) and only cater to their advertiser's and a few select channel's desires. This is a direction that they have been on for awhile now with their subscription and cable channel offerings and incremental impediments to their creative base. The company that used to say "Do no evil" has completed its transformation into that evil. Time to replace them. They have nothing to offer anymore.

Sorry! Not sure what happened there. It looked OK before I posted it and earlier posts are fine.

There is no technical requirement that the Internet have ISP's at all. They are the prime points of profit-making, control, and spying on people. We are blinded to this by service providers and powerful interests that maintain their status quo by killing off other approaches. All of the routers and cell phones which are ubiquitous today can already talk with with each other and route data to more distant locations if only they had the software to do so. In fact, re-purposing existing equipment is how many of the coops and home-grown providers originally built out their networks and provided service to people the large companies didn't see as profitable enough. The problem all of these providers ultimately face (and the thing that most often kills them) is the cost of interconnecting with a carrier of the "public" Internet and the cost of backhaul to that interconnect. Back in the early 2000's Verizon cut a plum deal with the government in exchange for it deploying service into unserved areas but later reneged and payed a fine for refusing to expand service into those areas. Verizon's CEO was heard saying that the fine only constituted "9 minutes of revenue" for the company, a fraction of what keeping its promise would have cost. The Internet, at its heart, is quite simple. Everything on the Internet has a unique address. All data is broken up into packets, placed in an "envelope" addressed with the source and destination and, sent to its destination or on to a router that connects further out. Currently that router connects to your ISP but it just as well could connect to your neighbor or someone else's router nearby. In fact, there was a time when ISP's operated that way. Your phone (or pc or whatever) could keep the packets meant for it and route packets onward to more distant locations through anyone within radio range who would then also do the same. Today this could be done with a "Routing Daemon" system module replacement and some small changes to the wifi and other protocols. The service would at first appear slow by today's standards due to the number of hops but with time, technology, and political will it could quickly improve bandwidth and performance to today's expectations and well beyond. Instead of using "pipes" owned by corporations and governments it would use the wide open physical space we all live in - an open 4 dimensional bandwidth space instead of metered linear toll pipes. Ultimately the space-bandwidth performance would be much better than is possible with today's narrow techniques. BGP and other current routing protocols do not work well in that environment. Discovery and other supervisory packets quickly swamp the infrastructure and can't keep up with the dynamics of the large constantly changing network. There have been attempts to build peer-to-peer networks but they are either not scaleable or ultimately rely on connections to the commercial Internet to work. It will take a new approach to routing. Back in the late 1990's I worked on that problem and helped develop an Internet infrastructure that embedded GPS data in IPv6 and distinguished between fixed locations (such as wifi routers) and mobile devices. Routing became simple. There is a whole other story about what happened to that project but in any case the ideas did work. Each device also had its own private and public keys for encrypting both link and end-to-end traffic for integrity and security. DNS and other necessary services could also be implemented as distributed services that reside on users hardware eliminating another stranglehold. Social networks could exist distributed across user's equipment instead of on corporate servers, perhaps using a blockchain approach, shutting out another privacy theft. With encryption built into its core and data traversing the countryside in pieces on random paths it would be extremely difficult to tap, monitor, censor, or control. No backbone or service providers needed. No monthly bills. The amazing things is that all of the hardware needed to implement this is already in place right now! This new free open source global Internet could become a reality in days simply by people installing an open source app and/or replacing the firmware on their router. That's all it would take to start. A new industry could grow to provide ever better equipment for it. An open source software project could get it started. It would finally implement the "universal service" that the FCC charges you on your phone bill (in the US) but has never delivered (the money just goes to the telcos). It would be available to anyone for the one-time cost of the equipment or the installation of a free application on their existing equipment. You could say goodbye to your ISP and cable company for good. Of course there is no reason that it couldn't interconnect with the "metered product delivery" services that Verizon, ATT, Comcast, and others want the Internet to be, and, in fact, would take a load off their systems, a problem which they constantly complain about and an excuse they use to limit service and charge extra fees. In fact, it addresses one their main arguments for eliminating net neutrality! They could charge tolls for their special services but you wouldn't have to use them. With "net neutrality" and security built into its core a new global Internet owned by everyone and no one would just appear out of nowhere while the "Old Internet" would be relegated to being a shopping mall on its periphery.

All the more reason to use open source software that doesn't rely on third party corporate keyholders. Seriously, anyone really concerned about secure communication is not going to rely on a consumer oriented mass-market service run by a profit-making company. They'll use a custom one-time pad for encryption and some steganographic technique to send the encrypted message through an unconnected communication or not use the public Internet at all.

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, after threats from the NSA that his refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program in February of 2001, more than six months before September 11, 2001. He was the only head of a communications company to demand a court order, or approval under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in order to turn over communications records to the NSA. The NSA cancelled a lucrative contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program. Nacchio and six other former Qwest executives were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accusing them of a $3 billion financial fraud between 1999 and 2002 and of benefiting from an inflated stock price, a price based on the NSA contracts in place at the time. His defense was ruled not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an "in limine" motion to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Mr. DiNaccio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible. Nacchio was convicted on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $19 million fine and forfeit $52 million he gained in stock sales. Nacchio surrendered April 14, 2009 to a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania to begin serving a six-year sentence. The United States Supreme Court denied bail pending appeal the same day. Nacchio finished serving his sentence on September 20, 2013.